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GeoTec 2008 will be happening in Ottawa Jun 2-5. This is always an interesting event with very forward
looking sessions. A few highlights involving some of my colleagues include
Mon June 2 9-12 Doug Eberhard Workshop on Building Digital Cities entitled Convergence: Implications for eGovernment
Mon Jun 2 9-12 Mike Schlosser GIS Skills for the Engineering and CAD Professional
Tue Jun 3 1-2:30 Jonathan Knowles Using Collaboration Technology to Create Efficiencies and Maximize the Value of Geospatial Data
Tue June 3 1-2:30 Mike Schlosser Engineering GIS, Interoperability and PSAB 3150
Wed Jun 4 10:30-12 PANEL—Open Source in Government: The Canadian Experience
Panelists: Tyler Mitchell, executive director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, Geoff Zeiss, director of Technology, Autodesk, Dave McIlhagga, president & CEO, DM Solutions Group
Thurs Jun 5 9-10:30 Mike Schlosser Open Source Geospatial
I mnetioned earleir that this is a unique opportunity to also attend OSBOOTCamp 6 Jun 2-3 a two day event focusing on open source geospatial software, hosted at Careton University, in Ottawa, Canada.
June 25-27 the Autodesk Developer Network (ADN) will be hosting a Geospatial Devcamp at the Embassy
Suites in San Rafael, California. If you are interested in learning how to develop solutions with MapGuide, FDO, AutoCAD Map3D, and Topobase, you are invited to attend the devcamp to work directly with Autodesk developers to learn more about the APIs and other development tools that are available to application developers. The legendary Bob Bray and other Autodesk developers will be there, so I would recommend that if you have developed or are interested in developing geospatially-enabled applications involving MapGuide, FDO, and MapGuide, you should consider attending. The Geospatial Devcamp includes
I plan to be there and am looking forward to seeing many of you in San Rafael.
The Where 2.0 Conference , which is organized by Brady Forrest, is unique, primarily because the focus is on innovation in the
geospatial sector. This year we had speakers explaining how to build a DIY Drone (unmanned aerial vehicle), a fantastic view of the universe called Celestica, building a programmable GPS device using open source hardware, digital cities, and modelling crowd behaviour, to name just a few. The other unique thing about Where 2.0 is that there are no parallel sessions. This is achieved is by having many short sessions, 10-14 minutes each. This means that it is physically feasible to literally hear every presentation. Another unique thing about Where 2.0 is a relatively high proportion of presentations addressing how humanitarian causes can be assisted by web-based technology. For example, we had sessions talking about sustainability, green maps with the freeways removed, disaster technology, a talk about InSTEDD , which is an open source platform for responding more rapidly to humanitatian crises, and a talk about Ushahidi , a web site monitoring election violence in Kenya. There were also more mainstream presentations by John Hanke of Google, and Vincent Tao of Microsoft. John had a surprise guest, Jack Dangermond of ESRI, and Vincent showed something really fascinating that looked like Photosynth integrated into Virtual Earth. Video recordings of all the sessions are available on the Where 2.0 web site and I would encourage you to look at as many as you can.
Folks who come to Where 2.0 are serious about what they are doing and are prepared for hard work. Several of us, Jeremiah McKnelly, Chris Claydon, and myself, gave a three and a half hour lab on creating
web 2.0 applications on an open source platform. I was surprised at how well attended it was, over 70 people showed up, about half of whom were not developers. I was even more surprised by everyone's perseverance, because we took everyone through installing Oracle, Apache, MapGuide, MapGuide Studio, FDO, and the open source FDO Oracle provider developed by Haris Kurtagic of SL-KIng. But it is a tribute to Jeremiah and Chris that just about everyone, including the non developers, left with a real live running web mapping application. We have held this type of open source web mapping lab at several conferences beginning with GeoWeb when 40 people showed up for a 6 hour lab in Vancouver, and 39 people left with a running open source web application. So there is clearly a lot of interest among both developers and non-developers.
Where 2.0 will be taking place May 12-14 at the San Francisco Airport Marriott. This is a major geospatial event of the year. There are sessions by many of the important folks in the geospatial
industry
including many open source geospatial sessions. I would encourage you to try to make it.
Autodesk and Google are diamond sponsors this year. Several of us from Autodesk will be presenting at the event.
Monday, 05/12/2008
1:30pm - 5:00pm Creating Web 2.0 Applications on an Open Source Geospatial Platform
Location: Salon F
Jeremiah Mcknelly, Chris Claydon, Geoff Zeiss
The tutorial is aimed at developers and others who are interested in the business and technical aspects of developing software on a Web 2.0 open source geospatial platform. No background in web development is required. The workshop will include both business and hands-on technical aspects of developing web mapping applications.
Tuesday, 05/13/2008
Convergence of Architectural and Engineering Design and Location Technology: Implications for eGovernment
11:40am Location: Salon A-F
Geoff Zeiss
The convergence of architectural and engineering design, location, and 3D simulation technologies is being driven by productivity and efficiency in the construction industry. But convergence will also enable governments to create a simulated urban environment that will have important implications for citizen involvement, urban planning, emergency planning, and first response.
Wednesday, 05/14/2008
Digital Cities
2:30pm Location: Salon A-F
Doug Eberhard
Where the world will conceptualize and realize more sustainable cities through the convergence of digital modeling, simulation, visualization, web services and human collaboration. In our local cities and global economies today, we continue to see increased demand and democratization for richer visual information and communication moving from analog to digital, 2D to 3D, to 4D and beyond. For people and organizations involved in the planning, design, construction and operations lifecycle of our cities, there is an even greater demand for interoperable “digital city” models with the right levels of detail and accuracy needed to make collective, trusted and timely decisions about existing and proposed conditions.
Intermap Technologies will host a free webinar on Geospatial Data in Engineering Thurs and Fri of this
week.
When engineers and architects design buildings and infrastructure, they can no longer do this in isolation. They need to take into account location. Sustainability initiatives such as LEED certification is one of the major drivers for this, but in different countries other drivers often government legislation are the primary motivators. For example, in the UK right to light is an important driver, in Germany noise abatement, and in many jurisdictions 3D zoning regulations such as view protection are important drivers. Intermap Technologies is a primary provider of high precision DSMs and DTMs captured via aerial overflights and radar. In this webinar we will discuss the implications of technology advances in software together with high precision geospatial data is enabling the modeling of urban environments.
North American Webinar
Date: Thursday, May 8
Time: 8:00 a.m. PDT; 9:00 a.m. MDT; 10:00 a.m. CDT; 11:00 a.m. EDT
European Webinar
Date: Friday, May 9
Time: 14:00 CEST
Moderator - Kevin Thomas
Primary speaker - John Weeber / Larry Starling
Subject matter experts - Geoff Zeiss, Neal Niemiec
To sign up go to Terrainscapes .
The OSBOOTCamp 6 will be a two day event focusing on open source geospatial software, hosted at
Careton University, in Ottawa, Canada. Come and hear industry experts present talks on web mapping, GIS analysis, OSGeo projects and more.
This year OSBOOTCamp coincides with GeoTec 2008 Jun 2-5 in Ottawa, so you can catch both while you're in Ottawa.
In GIS Development April 2008 there is an interview with Lisa Campbell, who is responsible for Geospatial
Solutions at Autodesk. It is worthwhile taking a close look at this interview because Lisa gives her perspective on some of the important things that Autodesk is doing in the geospatial/infrastructure management domain.
These are important perceptions, that are having important implications for CAD users in the utility, telecommunications, and local government sectors.
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